May 12, 2017

Happy Friday

Family and friends are not our whole life, but make our lives whole.

Family and friends always make my life whole, especially on a Happy Friday!

National Limerick Day

It is observed annually on May 12 and celebrates the birthday of English artist, illustrator, author, and poet Edward Lear. He is known mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry, prose, and limericks.
National Limerick Day also celebrates the limerick poem, a very short, humorous, nonsense poem. Within a limerick, there are five lines.  The first two lines rhyme with the fifth line and the third and fourth line rhyme together. The first, second, and fifth lines must have seven to ten syllables while rhyming and having the same verbal rhythm. The third and fourth lines only have to have five to seven syllables, and have to rhyme with each other and have the same rhythm. The limerick also has a particular rhythm which is officially described as anapestic trimeter
A limerick example of a nursery rhyme.
    “Hickory, dickory, dock,
    The mouse ran up the clock.
    The clock struck one,
    And down he run,
    Hickory, dickory, dock.”

There once was a man named Lodge,
who had seat belts installed in his Dodge.
When his date was strapped in,
He committed a sin,
without ever leaving the garage.


A bather whose clothing was strewed
By winds that left her quite nude
Saw a man come along
And unless I am wrong
You expected this line to be lewd.

Mother's Day

In the US, Mother's Day is celebrated May 14. In the UK, Mothering Day was celebrated March 26, where it is always celebrated on the fourth Sunday of Lent, three weeks before Easter Sunday.

Anna Jarvis had originally conceived of Mother's Day as a day of personal celebration between mothers and families. During 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed a measure officially establishing the second Sunday in May as Mother's Day in the US. It wasn’t to celebrate all mothers. It was to celebrate the best mother you have ever known, your mother.

The day took off in Britain when a vicar's daughter, Constance Smith was inspired by a newspaper report of Jarvis' campaign and began a push for the day to be officially marked in England. Smith founded the Mothering Sunday Movement and even wrote a booklet, "The Revival of Mothering Sunday" in 1920. Interestingly, neither Smith nor Jarvis became mother’s themselves.

The French celebrate Mother's Day on the last Sunday in May. Mother’s Day in Spain is celebrated on December 8th.

Wordology, Donnybrook

A  donnybrook is a free-for-all or brawl and is usually a public quarrel or dispute. Usage of the word stems from history of a place in Ireland. The word donnybrook comes from Domhnach Broc, meaning 'The Church of Saint Broc'. A donnybrook is larger than a fight, but smaller than a brouhaha or hubbub.

The Donnybrook Fair was an annual eight to fourteen day event held in Donnybrook, Ireland from the 1200s to the mid 1800s. The fair was legendary for the vast quantities of liquor consumed, the number of hasty marriages performed during the week following it, and for the frequent brawls that erupted throughout it. From the 1790s on there were campaigns against the drunken brawl the fair had become. The event was abolished in 1855, but not before its name had become a generic term for a free-for-all.

Incidentally, there is an annual Donnybrook Fair held in Walsh, Ontario, Canada named after the Dublin fair.

Five Time Tips for Success

Planning for success is necessary for achieving success. Remember the old adage, "Failure to plan means planning for failure." Here are a few tips that might help increase your chances for success.

Take time at the beginning of each day tо рlаn your dау. If you do not know what you are going to do, you will never know if you achieved it.

Create your ToDo list with A,B,C priorities, with A being most important to you. Spend Eighty percent of your time on A items, fifteen percent of your time on B items, and the remainder on C items. If you do this each day, you can satisfy your own needs as well as others, but with the proper priority for your own success.

Take time before еvеrу call аnd tаѕk tо dесіdе what rеѕult you desire. Define success and you can achieve it. When on the phone smile, it will do wonders for your attitude.

Do not answer the phone, email, or text just because they happen. I call this letting others steal your time. In order to be the most productive, schedule time to put phone in airline mode and shut down email and text. When you are ready for others, turn them back on and answer with your priorities, not others'.

Every day, compliment at least one person. Also, try to smile at people more often. An engaging smile is a precursor to success.

Quote

Someone on the web made a picture for one of my quotes. In fact I found at least 12 sites that have reposted this quote.

HDMI Cable Facts

So, you bought a new 4k TV and the salesperson is trying to sell you new whizbang goochi goochi 4k, or Ultra HDMI, or HDMI-2 cables to handle the new high speeds. Do not listen. It is a scam to increase store profit.

It is important to understand that HDMI cables are pipes, just like water pipes. Liquid goes in liquid comes out. The pipe does not care whether it is water or soda or rum. In HDMI cables, data goes in and data comes out. No decisions are made, nothing is done to the data, it simply passes through the cable. The cable does not care what type of data it is.

A quote from HDMI.org: "Version 2.0 of the HDMI Specification does not define new cables or new connectors. Current High Speed cables (category 2 cables) are capable of carrying the increased bandwidth."

By definition, HDMI supports standard, enhanced, or high-definition video, plus multi-channel digital audio on a single cable. There have been two HDMI cable standards, standard and high speed. Standard HDMI cables have been out of date since about 2010, but still support devices up to 1080. High speed cables support everything, including 4k, etc. They do not care whether the signal is standard, HDR, 4K, ULTRA, HDMI1, or HDMI2. HDMI cables are marked on the package and on the cable, so just avoid cables marked "standard" and you will be fine for 4K.

Gold ends, fancy cord wrapping, etc., are pretty, but not important for delivering signals to the TV. Manufacturing quality may have some slight affect and might not last long if abused. Of course, when was the last time you abused your cables. You plug them in, hide them behind the TV and forget about them.

The difference in cable quality does matter when you buy longer lengths. Usually HDMI cables are less than about 9 feet in length. If you want to string a 50 foot HDMI cable to a different part of the house, then quality is important, so the signal is not lost along the length. It still has nothing to do HDR, 4K, etc., it is simply manufacturing quality and potential signal loss.

Incidentally, there is a new standard coming out toward the end of 2017 called HDBaseT. The HDBaseT cable combines audio and video signals, USB, network, and even power into one single cable and is set to replace HDMI in the long run. It will be in the next generation devices, but that will likely take years.

Pay TV Dropout Rate

Over 750,000 American households ditched pay TV during the first quarter of 2017.

May 5, 2017

Happy Friday

Laugh at yourself and it will cure your depression. Laugh with others to ease their pain.

I love to laugh out loud, alone and with others, especially on a Happy Friday!